


I'll Be Back Soon, Okay?

by Alice_Rider



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 01:31:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alice_Rider/pseuds/Alice_Rider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you can't be her matesprit, you may as well try to be her friend, right?</p>
<p>A story of love, lies, and maybe a smidge of death. A story about how mistakes were made, and sorrys were exchanged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Of Love and Loss

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, this will be, and I hope, a multi-chapter kind of deal. This one is rather short, but they will, and I hope, get longer as the story goes on.

You find yourself to be one famously cantankerous troll with one of the worst kept secrets in all of secret-dom and an overwhelming crush on a girl that wanted no part of you in _any_ of her quadrants.  
You also haven’t seen her in the past week and a half; it wasn’t even your fault this time! You just saw her kind of slump away from Can Town with this look on her face, something like guilt and terror and anger all mixed up. Then she locked herself up in her respite block and hadn’t made a peep since.  
Can Town was rather impressive; you’d never admit that out loud, but you had to hand it to her, the Dersite, and the nookfuck, they knew how to build a decent city.  
There were a couple of raised eyebrows at your appearance, blinking like they’d seen an apparition; you’ve been avoiding Can Town like it was infested with the troll plague lest you actually lose what little sanity you have left. But you need help and this is the only place where an encounter with him was certain.  
The Mayor scurried past in his frantic funny way, hands full of chalk.  
“Mayor, put those back. Mayor. Dammit, get back here.” He rounded a skyscraper made out of grape juice, gave a weird sort of halt like he was expecting you to be the Mayor and –oh shit, you are so not, at least you weren’t, that last time you checked—before he sidestepped you and rushed past.  
“Hey douche bag, I was looking for you!” You don’t know if you should feel insulted or just plain disgusted at his lack of worry; you decide on a gross combination of both.  
“What in the holy fuck for?” He looked really stupid chasing the carapace all through kingdom come, barely missing capture every time that sash was within reach; you almost laugh, but then your eyes glance down to the spot where she was supposed to be, dying of a cackling fit on the floor and the smile that found its way to your lips died.  
“What’s the password to her door?” You take secret pleasure in watching him fumble about; it was nice to know that being stuck on this hell hole of a meteor wasn’t just getting to you.  
“Why would I tell you?”  
“Because she’s not answering and it’s almost been two weeks since I’ve seen anyone go in or out.”  
“So you’ve resorted to stalking now?”  
“Fuck off, Strider. And by fuck off, I mean: give me the gog damned pass code.”  
Mayor tried another turn and ran right smack into a Tab skyscraper; the only visible parts of him after the tower toppled were his hands, still holding onto the chalk for dear life.  
“I don’t even know the code. She changed it a while back.” You almost felt something like concern for the little self-elected leader until you watched Dave wrench the chalk from his fingers and tiny arms begin to flail under empty cans. “And it hasn’t been two weeks. I saw her yesterday, when we were going through the dream bubble. She said she was sick with the troll flu or somethin’. She’s fine.”  
Of course it was yesterday, the one day you decide to fall asleep on a stupid, uncomfortable pile of horns because you couldn’t stand wandering around these gog forsaken hallways alone anymore.  
“I suggest you stay away from her, Karkat. Based on your spot in the hemospectrum, her simple illness may be something much worse for you.”  
Holy shit. How long had Rose been in that chair in the corner?  
“How in the name of the unholy matron do you know where I stand on the spectrum?”  
She gave you this look that made you despise her a little more and feel like paradox space’s biggest moron all at the same time.  
You shove your turtleneck up to your cheeks, partly in defeat, partly to hide the embarrassed blush creeping up and huff out of the room with a sour, “I know, I know,” under your breath.


	2. Sleep Is For The Defeated

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok! That took way longer to post than I had planned. Terribly sorry.
> 
> But. Woo, chapter two. Fun stuff. So, plot slowly developing. We'll get there one day, I promise.
> 
> So. Please do tell what you think. And stuff. I do love your thoughts

You are getting far too comfortable sitting here talking to nothing. She wasn’t even answering, you hadn’t heard any sort of noise in the gog only knew how many hours you’d been here; you’d called for her to open up until your voice was hoarse, thought you weren’t intent on giving up; you’d plopped down next to her door and cursed passwords and existence in general for a while until you couldn’t think of any more swear to throw at the universe.  
There was a can of some weird red soup rolling absently between your hands—you’d absconded with it from the reserves of Can Town when the douche bag was too busy with the Dersite in hopes of coaxing her out—but you were too busy glaring at the dimly lit keyboard attached to the door, the one thing keeping you out. You hadn’t even attempted to guess the code; knowing Terezi, the human concept of “three strikes and you’re out” wasn’t even an option; you were nearly sure that if you pressed the wrong button on the first time around that some horrible Alternian death trap would be waiting for you. Not that you had much room to bedamn, you were the first, after all, to endeavor (and flounder pathetically) to keep infuriating ghosts out of your memories to save yourself from humiliation.  
“Terezi, come on. This is just stupid.” You weren’t really sure what you were saying anymore, you just wanted some sort of sign that she was at least listening. Hell, knowing that she was even still in there would have been pretty fucking nice.  
You shouldn’t be so tired. The floor was doing its best impersonation of ice and the wall against your back wasn’t exactly comfortable, but your eyes were heavy and keeping them open was a losing battle.  
Can kicked aside, you curl your knees up so you can rest you head on your arms for just a moment.  
__________________________________  
“You’re lying.” You suddenly find yourself one very suspicious Seer of Light and you can see right through your brother’s bull. You just aren’t exactly sure what it was that you’re supposed to be seeing.  
“What about this time?”  
“I…don’t know.” It takes a tremendous amount of effort to swallow your pride long enough to admit it, but you console yourself with the knowledge that you can at least psycho-analyze your way through this little gap in your vision.  
Or you could just wait until Dave subconsciously confessed everything in one of his idiotic raps. But that wasn’t as fun.  
“But whatever you just told Karkat wasn’t the truth.”  
“No. Ha, no. Don’t even try your therapist babble. It doesn’t work anymore, sis. You have no evidence, just another one of your freaky Seer hunches, so don’t even try it unless you have some fool proof pudding.”  
You had to admit, he was getting rather good at the whole mind trickery thing. But you were still better. “You’re coolkid act is slipping, Dave.”  
His hand jerked for a second and the tower he was so carefully rebuilding after its highlight debacle with the Mayor and the laws of gravity almost came tumbling down again. You gain a sly smirk at seeing his eyebrow twitch just a fraction of a centimeter.  
“Speaking of food items that I haven’t had since for-fucking-ever, you’re failing me on the aj front, Ro. You promised me some aj.” Oh, he was getting very good at this.  
“I said I’ll see what I can do. Do you have any idea how hard it is to conjure up an apple, the immense concentration and excruciating attention to detail it takes to create even the simplest of items?” You could keep talking for ages about the whole relativity of the apple again, but it would take too long and that was exactly what he wanted. You were not about to lose a battle of wits to your brother. “But I can alchemize some Tab, if you’d like. Maybe you could take some to your ailing troll girl, a pick me up of sorts.”  
“For the love of all that’s good and fucking holy, Rose. She told me yesterday that she changed the password to her door, said she needed to be left alone ‘til she got better. No big whoop.”  
You really couldn’t find the words to say; he was spent, done with dealing with the day; Can Town was just a way to try to kill time until he was tired enough to sleep again.. Trying to con the answer out would be the opposite of progress and he’d just shut down until he didn’t care anymore if it was an acceptable hour to lock himself away in his room and just leave. As much as you thought him an insufferable prick at times, you really didn’t want to badger your brother.  
So you watch him from your chair as he just stacked away, each can so neatly aligned you could have thought Terezi was standing over him. He looked worn, like he’d let his poker face relax for a moment, the kind of beat down that had maybe been caused by some great unknown secret or maybe you were looking too closely in hopes of finding an answer.  
You still can’t help but feel that he’s lying.  
________________________________  
“Karkat?”  
Damn. You so did not fall asleep. Nope. Not in the slightest. You were conscious the whole time, you swear on the good mother grub.  
“Karkat, get up. It’s not healthy for you to sleep like that.”  
Well, at least it was Kanaya, you didn’t mind letting whatever fake fronts you put up with the others fall around her.  
“Kan…” You aren’t really sure if you want any answers to the questions buzzing about your think pan.  
“Come on.” She held out a hand and smiled that motherly smile of hers, but it’s her eyes that get you; she pitied you, and it wasn’t even the normal type of pity, it was that human version of it, all twisted up and sickening as it was; she felt bad for you; you aren’t sure whether or not you should hate yourself a little more for that. “Let’s go.”  
You don’t really recall the day when you reached her in stature—not that being as tall as Kanaya meant much—but you kind of miss being able to hide yourself under the crook of her neck; it was comforting, to say the least.  
She’s leading you off somewhere, probably to one of those funny human “beds” that weren’t as uncomfortable as the others made them out to be, and you think with a small smile that you should probably care more about where the rainbow drinker was taking you. Then you decide that you are all out of fucks to give for the day. Probably for the rest of the millennia.  
But you have to know at least one thing. “Kan, did she…”  
“No. No she didn’t.”


	3. The Funny Hand of Fate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo! Chapter 3! So sorry for the late update. But please guys, keep those reviews coming in, I really appreciate everything you have to say, so please don't be shy.  
> Anyways, enjoy.  
> I really hope it makes sense. It did inside my head...

Damn, you’re asleep again. You don’t know where your sudden buddy-ship with the ever evasive enigma the others referred to in such high reverence as sleep sprung up from, but this whole “resting every night” thing was starting to become a cumbersome usage of those dead hours where you could be off sulking in a secluded corner of the ship doing what you do best: mucking up timelines and cursing the air.  
But it was easier this way for your own terrible luck to fuck you over. Terezi’s tree hive. Terezi’s fucking tree hive. Yeah sure, you’d only been missing her very presence in real life hard enough to make up for Strider’s lack of emotions and to fill your self-pity quota for the next three sweeps. Twice. So why not just wake up—wake up? Could you still use that term even though are technically still asleep?—in Terezi Memory Central staring up at the one place you thought you’d never have to step foot anywhere near ever again?  
You barely remember the forest this far back in time. Judging by the amount of scalemates in the trees—or lack thereof you should say—you guys were young, small enough that she couldn’t quite get up high enough for a proper hanging. And with Terezi, if it wasn’t right, it wasn’t happening.  
You didn’t come around here much when you were little, really didn’t until you were about five sweeps or so when you could at least stand your own in a one-on-one—Terezi, Vriska, and Nepeta had been the inseparable trio back then, causing havoc where ever their lusii would let them roam; and with you being the only boy stupid enough to keep coming back for whoopings, a gang up was inevitable. And Crab-dad had finally let up a bit on his stranglehold over your curfew.  
There was no telling, though, what time of night it was or who even starred in this dream bubble or which version of the crazy blind girl was running the joint. Wouldn’t it have been just the cherry on top of the whole cake, running into the very girl that’s been avoiding you?  
“No! No no no no no!” Why did that voice sound familiar and where in the hell was it coming from? “You can’t have it!”  
“Get back here, Vantas! I just wanna see it!”  
Oh, that’s why it rang a bell; and if you were right about the whole time period thing, the ruckus was probably emanating from the hive; you weren’t allowed outside around here much, you lusus always thought that Vriska would eat you or some shit like that. Looking back now, maybe there was just a smidge of reason behind all of that paranoia.  
“Back up, fuckass! It’s mine!” You have to try your very best not to laugh because, frankly, that was adorable. God damn, you were just not cut out for the whole “intimidating” business.  
“Aw, purrease, Karkitty? We just want to play with it for a bit!”  
You remember this day. You’d just gotten that new toy for your wriggling day and you wanted to show it off; it was a stupid crab, all various shades of red and oddly stitched as it was, your lusus had found in who knows where; the only reason you were being tortured here and not elsewhere was because Sollux had been grounded for blowing up part of his communal hive.  
You’d loved that raggedy thing, loved it ‘til Terezi stole it two weeks later, found it guilty of stealing some of her favorite chalk, and hung it from a branch next to her already growing collection of “convicted felons.” You wonder if she ever took it down as the time went by…  
You weren’t aware that memories of your still-pupating selves could conjure up bubbles, it was always your impression that only the living and ghost players of the session could make a bubble react, shift, and shape itself to a likeness of something long past. But the chances of her being asleep to be dreaming all of this up were slim to none, and with your luck, it was probably you at the reins of the memory.  
And if you really were in charge of the whole show, how far could you walk, then, before the bubble reset you back to the start, or it was possible, before you fell off the edge?  
Terezi’s reach, even as a wriggler with no lusus who barely had control over her limbs, in these woods seemed endless; piles of discarded, guilty scalemates, of every color under the Alternian moon, heaped together by the roots of the trees, all of them patiently awaiting their demise. Creepy little things; you always felt like there were watching you with those glossy button eyes.  
Wait a second.  
You’d nearly over-looked it, the sight so common over your many sweeps of being dragged here that you’d dismissed it as common place and almost moved on, but there it was. A red scalemate with its fate wound around its neck, swaying from a tree branch. There was only one troll you knew that could tie a noose like that.  
How in the holy fuck did that get up there? She hadn’t known how to climb all that well in this time frame, not nearly well enough to get that high up.  
You were sure that blue one just dropped out of nowhere. You know you weren’t crazy, it was still swinging from the drop, leaves were still fluttering down from being disturbed.  
“Terezi?”  
For a whole minute, the forest stood frozen.  
“Terezi, I know you’re up there. Terezi!”  
After a whole five minutes of being left to stand there like a moron, you decide that you really are losing it and turn back towards the tree hive. You might as well figure out what happened after Vriska knocked you clean out all those sweeps ago.


	4. Sleeping Beauty

Karkat had never been, and probably never would be, a little thing that the rest of the universe liked to call “sane”, but over the course of the two years you’d spent with him on the meteor, you’d grown to accept his own special brand of crazy; it was, dare you say, even a bit fun to be around him sometimes because you could make his face flush red with anger and cool him down just like that. Karkat really wasn’t all that bad a troll; if his Napoleon complex would ease up a bit, he might even be somewhat pleasant.  
You liked to say that you knew Karkat, at least enough to tell when something was on his mind, but lately, you couldn’t even begin to put into words what was wrong with him. He wasn’t eating, wasn’t drinking—Kanaya has had to on more than one occasion sit him down and practically force nourishment down his throat—he wasn’t yelling, or rampaging, or cursing; he wasn’t talking much these past few days; you were lucky if he said hello to you in the mornings, and it was a small miracle in itself if he flung some ill-wish at your brother under his breath.  
One thing he was getting, though, was sleep, and plenty of it. It used to be next to impossible—and you don’t throw the word “impossible” around lightly anymore, not after all you’ve seen and heard and done—to get him to put his head down for five minutes, and now you find him curled up in random corners about the lab every time you turn around. In a normal case, a sudden decrease in the hours of sleep the body undergoes was a red flag that the mind was fighting with itself, but Karkat wasn’t just any other case. He and the enigma of sleep had never gotten along and it was once a commonplace sight to find him mashing away at the keys of some poor computer, waging war with some other time-locked version of himself. That’s just who Karkat was; he was irrational, and shouty, and a really decent person deep down. This side of him, frankly, was starting to scare the living hell out of you.  
And now he was in Can Town, pacing the streets again like he did when he wasn’t off in some dream bubble who knows where doing who knows what, he had to be; Dave in the library was not an everyday sight, to say the least. And one Dave Strider staring at coffee machine like he was waiting for some answer was a billion-to-one chance on any day.  
“Whatever it is you want, the answer is no.”  
“I haven’t said anything.” At least, you were pretty sure you hadn’t, you’d been so lost in your worries that you could have agreed to sell you soul and not have known it.  
“Exactly. You talk and talk and talk all day about the game and the sessions and the relativity of apples,—I’m still waiting for my aj, by the way Sis. Any day now would be nice—but the moment you go silent, you want something and you stare at the person who has what you want until they give it to you.”  
“I do not stare.”  
“Yes. You do. And you don’t even know you’re doing it because you’re so spaced out. And now look at what you’ve gone and made me do. I was saving that joke for Harley when I saw her again. Now I’ve wasted it on you.”  
“Spaced out? Really, brother dear, if you’re attempting to woo a lady, particularly such a one as Jade Harley, you’ll have to think of some better quip. She has spent the last two and a half years with John, mind you, and it wouldn’t be beyond his creative thinking skills to throw a “spaced out” in his repertoire of horrible jokes. Besides, don’t you think she’s changed, even a little, since you two last spoke? Perhaps she’s matured some, at least enough to outgrow a petty play on words.”  
“Shut up. I never mentioned the word “woo”, whatever kind of fucked up string of letters that is. I said it was a joke and screw you it is funny because of ironic reasons only Striders and Harleys could understand.” He kicked the coffee machine and it hissed and sputtered and squealed until something vaguely resembling mire mud and smelled of dirt-cheap caffeine spurted out unto two cups. “Here, take it.” The Styrofoam full of wet dirt shimmied its way into your hands from across the table.  
“But I don’t—“  
“It’s not for you. You have to give it to Karkat so he can wake the fuck up and get the hell out of Can Town. He’s walking up and down the streets like some sort of zombie and it’s freaking the Mayor out. And he won’t take it from me even if I did care enough to help.”  
“You’re coming to the wrong person. I think the only one he’d listen to is Terezi at this point. Kanaya’s lost most of what little influence she had over him and we appear to be short on purple-blooded moirail. I really doubt he’ll do anything I ask of him.” It was an odd sensation, to have a name so taboo as Terezi’s flouting out there in the open. Two weeks wasn’t an exactly lengthy passage of time, but in that short timeframe, she’d become an anathema that could solve everyone’s problems, problems she’d started in the first place; your brother’s eye twitched.  
“I told you already that I’m not going to open that door.”  
There it was, that little, insignificant, ever-so-important slip in the lie you’ve been waiting for. “You won’t open the door, or you can’t?”  
That hard mask set on his face and you suddenly find your brother has been replaced by the insufferable prick of the past. “You know I can’t open it.”  
Even under his façade of calm coolness, you could tell he was raging; he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar and now he didn’t know how to get out.  
“You just spoke as if you could.”  
His fingernails were leaving marks in the foam side of his cup. His poker face was good, but it would never be what it was before he became a fully realized Knight.  
“Just—go and psycho-babble Karkat out or something.”  
You wouldn’t see your brother for the rest of the day after he slid out the back exit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in case you were kind of wondering why I made a semi-big deal about Dave being a fully realized Knight and his poker face power waning because of it, it's actually kind of interesting.  
> The title Knight is given to players who have one specific problem: they set up a mask to keep the rest of the world out. We all know Kar failed spectacularly at this and he's still going around all grump. Latula, well, I still don't know if she made it to God Tier. Doesn't seem so because she's all in her sk8er girl thing to whomever she talks to. But Dave actually made Tier. He broke that mask and that's why we see all of these expressive Dave sprites that smile and laugh and are, well, human. So I would imagine that if he tried to put that mask back on, it'd be cracked and imperfect and wouldn't quite hide him like it used to.  
> I just found this out about a week ago. And I've been reading this comic for a year. So I would assume there are still more of us that don't know or haven't realized.  
> Well, this is your fun fact of the day.  
> As always, please review. I do love to see what you think


End file.
